Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Thank you to Emma of Spiral Soaps, for sharing this wonderful tutorial on How To Make Liquid Soap. We had a heck of a time getting this to you. Enjoy it! And do let us all know how YOURS comes out.

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This tutorial demonstrates making liquid soap paste prior to dilution, using glycerine in place of water. To calculate your recipe, I suggest doing it here. Also, hints and tips and makers experiences can be found here on The Dish Forum.

Here is how I made it, have fun experimenting! (I used olive and castor oils)

step1. Melt your oils of choice in a crock pot

step 2. Heat up the glycerine (use in place of water amount) in a pan and keep hot on a very low flame. Very carefully add your potassium hydroxide a little at a time, stirring all the time, whilst still on the heat.

You must add the lye carefully and slowly as it tends to volcano if you add too much at a time. Keep stirring it down.

step 4. Once the lye has dissolved completely, carefully pour it into the hot oils in the crock pot and stir with a whisk.

step 5. Keep stirring as it goes through several changes quite quickly, after it forms an emulsion, it starts to thicken and darken.

step 6. Little bubbles start to form as you whisk and fly away into the air (this is my favorite bit!).

step 7. The next stage is thickens more and gets paler, like liquid caramel.

step 12. The next day, heat the crock pot again, until the mix turns clear and golden. Weigh some into a jar ready for diluting.

Finally, add the correct amount of boiling water for your desired
dilution. This will take trial and error for your particular recipe.

The soap mixture is left to dissolve in the hot water, stir very gently and slowly, to avoid bubbles forming. It will eventually dissolve and as it cools it will thicken. If it sets too thick, add more hot water and repeat the above, until you have the consistency you desire. make lots of notes about your dilution process, so that you can get the same results each time. Hopefully, you'll be able to add the correct amount of hot water in one go, once you have figured out how much is right for your recipe.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Celine has graciously offered this hanger swirl tutorial for those of you who are interested. Celine makes amazing soaps (I know firsthand) and they are stunning, too! Please go visit her site to peruse her art: www.iamhandmade.com

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The Hanger Swirl Technique by Celine Blacow (Ireland):

This technique allows you to incorporate an advanced design in your
cold process soaps very simply and easily, with equipment easily found in most
houses.

What do you
need? Firstly make up your usual cold process soap formula to the soap batter
stage.Divide it into at least two
colours, in the example shown, Adam + Eve, we’ve used a very classic
combination of black and white.Contrasting colours work best with this technique, however, you could
get a very interesting combination from colours within the same range (consider
using this technique as an add on to the gradient layers technique shown
earlier on this blog from Emily Shieh).

There are 9
basic steps in working with the Hanger Swirl Technique:

1Prepare
your soap as you normally would but choose a fragrance or essential oil and a
formulation that allows you time to play around with your soap – possibly not
the best time to try that new fragrance oil or your extra spicy essential oils!

2Choose
your colours - you’ll need a minimum of two colours and highly contrasting
colours work really well together.You
can, however, choose as many colours as you wish … in this example of my Adam +
Eve soap, I choose a classic combination of black and white.

3Have
your jugs of coloured soaps ready and pour in equal sized layers.The more layers, the more definition you
should achieve.Five or six layers are
probably best, with two being the minimum.

4Once
you have each layer poured, take your hanger.The hanger you’ll use is a regular wire hanger, the kind you get with
your dry cleaning.A plastic coated wire
hanger would be even better.Bend and
shape this so that it fits your mould perfectly, length and height wise.

5Bang
your mould to allow any bubbles to rise to the top and then you’re ready to use
your hanger.Place it at the longest
side of the mould furthest away from you.Push the hanger down into the mould, pushing lightly against the side of
the mould.When you reach the bottom of
your mould, move the hanger fractionally towards you, keeping it at the bottom
of the mould. Then pull the hanger up, keeping it nice and straight and slowly
drag it up through the layers of your soap.

6When
you reach the top, move it fractionally towards you again and then push it down
slowly back into the soap, keeping it nice and straight and moving slowly.

7Move
it fractionally closer towards you when it’s at the bottom of the mould, and
then pull it up again, slowly dragging it up towards the top.

8Repeat
until you have reached the other side of the mould.Depending on the width of your mould, you
might have to do the push/pull technique four or five times.You can repeat it going back in the other
direction, if you like.

9Once
you’ve finished, knock off any excess soap off the hanger and place it
carefully in your sink for washing up later.Then work on the top of the soap as you’d normally do.

The images
below show both the layers and how the hanger has broken through the layers to
create this swirl.